Cats in the Margins
by optimustaud
Summary: Kaneki Ken is afraid of the dark. Sasaki Haise likes to draw cats in the margins of his books.


I own nothing.

A big big Thank You to macrauchenia for taking the time to beta and smooth out the problems in this story.

* * *

 _Once upon a time, there was a poor farmer who had two sons and two daughters. One year there was a famine and the farmer knew there would be no way he could feed all of his children. He looked to his oldest son, who was a big strong lad with a talent for working the farm. He looked to his daughters who were obedient and hard working. They were a great help to his wife. He looked to his youngest son, who was cleverer then all his siblings, but also weak and small. The farmer decided his youngest son would never be a suitable farmer and sent him off to a monastery where he could learn to become a priest._

* * *

Kaneki Ken is a very small boy who is very afraid of the dark. His mother knows this and has an uncanny instinct for sensing the nights when he is most afraid. After a nightmare, he wakes to the gentle roll of the bed as she settles on its edge. Her rough fingers caress his scalp gently as she leans over him to inspect his tear stained cheeks. She pulls an old book of fairy tales off the shelf in his room. With the book balanced in one hand and the other stroking his head, Kaneki's mother reads to him until he falls asleep.

Then one day his mother dies and Kaneki is left all alone.

Life with the Asaoka's is not what he had hoped for, but he is clever and determined to prove himself. In his own, quiet way, Kaneki asks his aunt to make some room for him in her home. He doesn't care how small it was; he just wants one tiny corner where he can belong.

When the dark finds him during that first night, he had turns to his aunt for help.

It is a mistake he will not make twice.

Now when the dark nights come, Kaneki lays absolutely still, curled on his bed with his arms wrapped tightly around a pillow. He forces his fear deep into his gut, banishing it to a safe place so that in the morning no one can tell he had cried himself to sleep.

* * *

 _The farmer and his wife took their youngest son to the monastery at the edge of the village. The head priest examined the boy and asked him many difficult questions. The answers the boy gave were clever and they impressed the head priest so much that he agreed to take him on as an acolyte. Before she left, the boy's mother gave one last piece of advice to her son, "Avoid large places at night. Keep to small."_

* * *

Kaneki learns that the best way to protect himself is to make himself invisible. So he walks into the empty hallway and carefully makes his way to the bathroom an hour before anyone else is awake. He is out the door and on his way to school when his aunt sets the table for breakfast.

Kaneki knows that he is just a bit of dandelion fluff that has blown ungracefully into his aunt's life. He knows that if he drifts to the ground, she will crush him beneath her foot. Instead, he hovers, half-afraid of what he might find if he ever lands, half-afraid of what will happen if he never lands. He makes his way to school, curls into his desk like a caterpillar, and listens to the voices of the waking world.

It is Hide who shakes him from the land of dreams and fairy tales.

Kaneki watches his protean friend mingle with their classmates. Hide circulates from desk to desk, from clique to clique, like a sugar cube dissolving in water. Kaneki peaks at him from behind the pages of his book, feeling a bright surge of joy and hope as the other boy finally makes his way to where he is sitting.

Hide slams his palms against the desk and leans forward so close that their foreheads are almost touching. "KANEKI." He exclaims, casually and playfully. His words come out as sharp syllables, rushing through a highway of air. Kaneki can barely follow the excited jumble of phrases. He puts down his novel, cradles his chin in his hands, and smiles indulgently at his excitable friend.

 _This is enough_ , he thinks. He could be happy right here listening to the sound of Hide's voice. It doesn't matter if he is just another person in Hide's collection of acquaintances. Just so long as he can stay in his shadow, everything will be all right.

Suddenly two warm hands wrap over his shoulders and start to shake him violently.

"Kaneki are you even listening to me?" Kaneki's embarrassed blush gives him away.

Hide's face falls into a hurt pout. The expression lasts only for a moment before his smile is firmly back in place. "So Sunday?" He asks.

"Ummm sure." Kaneki has no idea what he has just agreed to, but anything is better than staying in his aunt's house by himself.

"Great! There are soooo many things we have to do . . ." Hide's voice trails off as he gives Kaneki the itinerary for their weekend adventure. Kaneki listens and says nothing, but he can't keep a soft pleased smile from appearing on his face.

Kaneki knows that good things never last and that the best things always fade fastest, but for now he thinks he would like things to stay like this for just a little while longer.

* * *

 _The boy began his new life at the monastery. He learned quickly and was very obedient. He had only one flaw: he liked to draw cats during the times when he should have been studying and would draw cats in places where they did not belong._

 _The boy developed a talent for drawing cats, much to the head priest's annoyance. Soon there were cat pictures everywhere in the temple: in the margins of books, on the walls, and on the temple's paper screens. The head priest decided that the boy would never make a good priest and banished him from the monastery. Before the boy left, the priest gave him one last piece of advice. "Avoid large places at night. Keep to small."_

* * *

They meet on Sunday, but they don't do anything special. Kaneki enjoys every minute of it. They raid the shopping district and stop for takeout. They spend the evening listening to music at Hide's house.

Hide reclines against his bed after a long day of goofing off. His eyes are half-closed as he lets the music sink into his skin. The sky is a bruised pink and purple and the dimming light of the sun casts a gentle hand over Hide's face. Kaneki holds his breath. There is something almost elemental in Hide's stillness and it makes the world around him seem more vibrant. Kaneki wonders if it is Hide who makes the dust motes dance as they travel through the thin fingers of light surrounding his face.

 _He's beautiful,_ Kaneki thinks. Then he blushes and turns his face away, shocked to the core by the thought that had dug its way into his conscious thoughts. Fear surfaces as heavy and familiar to him as his father's love-worn novels.

He pushes those thoughts away and buries them deep beneath the hardened strata of his consciousness. He feels like crying. Hide is the one place where he can be free of the fears and anxieties that clamor in his mind and suck his energy like marrow from a bone. Hide is too big and too complex to sum up with a simple word like best friend. For Kaneki, Hide exists somewhere between the words need and longing. The thought of ever losing him becomes far more frightening then enduring the darkness of a moonless night.

* * *

 _For a long time the boy wandered alone until he came to a village with a monastery, not unlike the one he was born in. He decided to go to that temple and see if the priests in that monastery would accept him as an acolyte._

* * *

April arrives in a swell of freshness, the air filled with the scent of new possibilities. There is a tightness in Kaneki's chest, born from his anxiety and excitement.

New apartment. New neighborhood. New school. There is more potential here for change than he ever dreamed possible. He almost bursts with an indefinable hope.

He stretches his trembling wings, still damp from his long incubation, and beats them unsteadily against the wind. He is not ready to fly just yet, but for the first time in his life, he dreams that flight may be possible.

He is the same person he always was. Shy, afraid, and awkward in his own body, but for the first time in his life, he doesn't mind. He thinks that maybe, someday soon, he won't feel like a stranger in his own skin.

He loves the challenge of his new classes and works up the courage to approach his lit professor to ask for novel recommendations. He chooses a bench on the campus green and claims it as his own.

He comes home to his apartment. The walls are empty and there is very little in the room besides his bed and his books, but it is wholly, wonderfully, and completely his in a way that little bedroom at the Asaoka's had never been. He celebrates his newfound freedom by making burgers at four in the morning.

One day he finds a coffee shop. _Why not_ , he thinks to himself. _I should try something new for once_. _If this place has good coffee, maybe I could bring Hide there some evening_ , he reasons. He walks up the stairs and pushes the door open.

* * *

 _It did not take long for the boy to realize that the temple had been abandoned. He looked through the dusty, empty rooms and found no one. The boy then noticed that the empty walls and paper screens in the temple were perfect for drawing cats._

 _He found a writing box in the temple. After grinding some ink, he started to draw cats on the walls and screens. He eventually grew tired and, remembering his mother's and the high priest's advice, searched for a place to sleep. He found a little cabinet with a sliding door and shut himself inside._

* * *

Kaneki spends ten days being taken apart and put back together again.

Pain is God. Pain is King. Pain rules this tiny little world in which Kaneki found himself. He is a bird in a cage—pinned down, trapped, and helpless. He waits and eventually he learns. He screams his throat raw and watches with deepening horror as his fingers and toes are pruned from his body, only to grow back once more.

He sits, watching as his blood and piss and vomit and shit grow in a puddle beneath his feet. He laughs, feeling a giddy warmth growing within him, as his toes grow from the split stumps of meat and cracked bone at the ends of his feet.

He wants to be clean. He wants to sleep. He wants to be safe. He wants to be warm.

There is nothing but pain and the sick isolation that comes when Yamori leaves him to heal. Kaneki can't decide which is worse. The torture is horrible, but it is nothing compared to the sick spiral of his thoughts when he is left alone.

The desire to lie down is almost overwhelming. The need to stretch his curled limbs and spine is enough to make him cry. He starts to daydream. Sometimes he thinks about his childhood. Sometimes he dreams about a field of white carnations dotted with red spider lilies. Sometimes he dreams of Rize.

He once begged Yamori to stop. Then he begged for rescue. Finally, he begged for death.

Now he doesn't beg anymore.

He remembers the exact moment he stopped fearing death and instead started to crave it. There is a centipede in his ear, crawling through his flesh and reshaping the path to his brain. It is nothing compared to the creature that has wormed its way underneath his skin. That creature now walks around in the body that used to belong to Kaneki Ken.

He exists in a world that grew between the pain, the loneliness, and the fear. There is Yamori and there is Rize. His entire reality can be defined simply by a wooden chair and a field of flowers. Yamori is cruel, but his pain is comforting in its predictability. Rize rips him open, forces him to look into the darkest, foulest parts of himself, and laughs when he crumbles in despair. Somewhere there is a little piece of Kaneki Ken, Japanese literature student and barista at Anteiku, who knows that the Rize in his daydreams is nothing more than the detached logical part of his mind. He cradles Rize between his hands and marvels at how tiny she is without the burdens of doubt and morality. He thinks on how easy it would be to break free of his birdcage if he were as tiny.

And isn't hilarious? Isn't it the _funniest_ thing you have ever heard? The binge-eater becomes the voice of reason.

In the end, he makes his decision. It isn't about justice, and it isn't about survival. He wants Yamori to pay. And if he can make the other man feel even a tenth of the hell that he has experienced over the last ten days, it would be enough. It would be more than enough.

So, the creature that used to be Kaneki Ken, Japanese literature student and barista at Anteiku, bends towards Yamori and eats.

But he is wrong. It isn't enough and Kaneki doubts it will ever be enough.

* * *

 _The boy awakened in the middle of the night by a terrible cry. From his tiny cabinet, the boy could hear screaming and fighting. He held his breath and listened to the noises. The whole temple started to shake and the boy was too terrified to look through the crack in the cabinet to see what was causing it. Eventually the noise stopped and the temple fell quiet._

* * *

Kaneki listens to Banjou and Hinami through the cotton balls, carefully stuffed into his ears. He shattered months ago and all that is holding his china plate body together is the field dressing that Banjou and Hinami have applied. His joints are held firmly in place by medical tape as he watches the world through the webbing of the gauze, gingerly wrapped around his eyes.

Everything is over and Kaneki feels like all that he had suffered amounted to nothing. He should have something more to show for his pain than white hair and a foul taste in his mouth.

His insides have been scooped out and replaced with cement, but somehow he manages to move through one day into the next. He focuses on a goal: find Kanou, destroy Aogiri, protect...protect…protect. So long as he is moving, he doesn't have to stop and think; so long as he keeps fighting, he doesn't have to analyze his feelings and motivations. He is Rize when he is hungry. He is Yamori when he fights. Kaneki Ken can barely breathe, crushed between the two of them.

The nights are the hardest. He misses the years when all he had to fear was the dark. He wonders how things would have been different if anyone had ever loved him. Would he have walked away a little less broken if his aunt had harbored even an ounce of affection for him? Would he have managed to keep hold of himself if his mother had the courage to live for him? He knows these thoughts are self-indulgent and childish, yet he still hates himself even more for thinking them.

In the mornings, he sits in the kitchen with a newspaper at his elbow. Banjou watches him from the other side of the table as he cracks all of the fingers on each hand, pausing only for a moment to repeat the process. The other man's gaze is sad and knowing. Kaneki hates him for it.

After the third morning in a row of listening to Kaneki's dissonant symphony of knuckle cracking, Banjou catches his hand to stop him. He gently rubs Kaneki's abused knuckles with one hand and reaches for the newspaper with the other. He points to the characters in the headlines. "Can you teach me to read this?"

It becomes something of a routine for the two of them. They sit at the kitchen table while Kaneki carefully copies out the hiragana and teaches Banjo how to pronounce them. Hinami joins them on the second day, quietly reading her novels and asking Kaneki about the kanji.

Kaneki gives himself over to their needs. He thinks briefly of a future that can never be and wonders what if?

* * *

 _The boy did not leave his cabinet until he was certain it was morning. He climbed out carefully and looked through the temple. The floors were covered in blood. He followed the blood trail through the temple until he found the body of an enormous goblin-rat, lying dead on the floor._

* * *

Anteiku falls. Wonderful, beautiful Nagachika Hideyoshi tries to save what is left of Kaneki's china plate existence.

He sees the grim reaper and all he can feel is relief. Finally, finally after so long, he can stop. That battered bit of dandelion fluff finally lands and blooms into a corpse flower.

* * *

 _The boy wondered just what could have killed the goblin-rat. Then he noticed that the drawings of the cats on the temple walls had changed. Their mouths and paws were stained red. The boy finally understood why it was so important to sleep in small places. He gathered his things and left the temple._

* * *

Sasaki Haise is happy. He knows he is missing things. There is a twenty-year gap in his memory that he can't explain. Still, there are people in his life who need him and he is grateful. He likes people; he likes to immerse himself in their lives. Each new person he meets is like a novel waiting to be read. Everyone is interesting because everyone has a new story to tell. He has been taken care of his whole life and he doesn't know what it means to be lonely, but he imagines it must be the most horrible fate anyone can suffer.

He tells himself that his past isn't important and immerses himself in the present. However, there are nights he wakes in darkness, shivering in fear, but he doesn't know why. The dream of the white haired phantom and the checkerboard floor become so familiar that they soon lose the ability to frighten him. The nights when he wakes from dreams of small dark places and the smell of old books terrify him the most.

Sasaki Haise likes to draw cats in the margins of his books. He doesn't know why.

(Saiko doesn't think they are cats at all. She thinks they look more like rabbits.)

* * *

The fairy tale I placed throughout this story is called "The Boy Who Drew Cats." The line "Avoid large places at night. Keep to small" fits Kaneki perfectly. And when I started writing this fic, I realized how much Ken's story parallels with the fairy tale.

hiragana- one of the Japanese syllabaries and the first one taught to Japanese students. There is a brief scene in the manga of Kaneki teaching Banjou the hiragana. I loved it so much I had to fit it into a story with the two of them. I think Kaneki is an excellent teacher and I wish there had been more of Banjou and Kaneki's brotherly relationship in the manga.


End file.
